Conventional line beam generators are typically based on stacks of microchannel cooled laser diode bars and have numerous reliability problems. Some problems include erosion and leaking of the microchannel coolers, leakage around 0-rings or other seals, and movement or misalignment over time of fast-axis collimation (FAC) optics. FIG. 1 shows a conventional bar-based line generator 100 that includes fourteen diode laser bars 112, each having sixty-three emitters, and that emits a total of eight hundred eighty-two diode laser beams. Additionally, fast-axis collimation lenses, an interleaver, a polarizer and mirror monolithic assembly 116, and other line beam optics, including a homogenizing light pipe 118 which receives incident beams directly aligned with a longitudinal axis thereof, are required to form a laser line output beam 119. While high reliability single emitter laser sources, which are cooled with standard cold plates, can be used in high power line beam systems instead of microchannel cooled bars, the possibility of such use is typically dismissed as an alternative since the reduction in the total number of laser sources increases the probability of non-uniformity in the line beam due to self-interference (or coherence) effects between sources. Accordingly, a need remains for innovation directed to solving the latent reliability problems as well as other problems in the high power line beam systems.